Canonical’s Launchpad gets a visual refresh

Canonical has rolled out a major visual update to its Launchpad project …

Launchpad, Canonical's web-based platform for collaborative software development and project hosting, has received a major visual refresh. The new user interface, which drops the clumsy menus of the previous version, is cleaner and more intuitive. As a user, I'm finding that this latest update has reduced the visual clutter and has made Launchpad more pleasant to use.

"We realize that if you've been using Launchpad for a while, these changes may take a bit of getting used to. But we're confident that the new designs will be more efficient once you're familiar with them. We also expect they'll be easier for people using Launchpad for the first time," said Launchpad UI designer Matthew Paul Thomas in a statement. "They also pave the way for even simpler interfaces in future Launchpad releases, where you'll be able to click on something and edit it in place."

I made the jump to Launchpad several months ago and left behind my old self-hosted Trac site. Although I had some trouble adapting at first, I've been happy with Launchpad's feature set and ease of use. I'm particularly pleased with its tight integration with Bazaar, a user-friendly distributed version control system. Launchpad was able to import the revision history from my old Subversion repository, so the transition to Bazaar was relatively painless.

For project hosting, Launchpad beats the pulp out of aging and bloated Sourceforge. Launchpad also offers a handful of unique features like Ubuntu package repository hosting and a cool system for facilitating community-driven localization. Although there are a lot of things that I like about Launchpad, there are also some areas where it needs improvement. The servers tend to be slow sometimes, which gets frustrating when I'm trying to quickly jump around between various bug reports. My only other major complaint is that it doesn't provide a built-in Wiki for individual projects—a feature that I really used a lot with Trac.

Launchpad improvements seem to be rolling in on a regular basis, however, so I doubt that my complaints will last for long. In addition to the visual update last night, several other features have been added recently, including a new e-mail interface to the built-in code review system.

Launchpad isn't the only new game in town for open source project hosting. Another really good alternative that I've been playing with is Github, which is built with Ruby on Rails, has an extremely polished user interface, and very good integration for Git, another popular distributed version control system.

Github and Launchpad both leverage modern web technologies to offer richer user interfaces and new kinds of project status visualizations. This much-needed innovation is largely absent in Sourceforge and Google's underpowered project hosting service. Github and Launchpad are stretching the boundaries of collaborative programming in productive ways and could bring about some changes in the expectations that developers have for project hosting.